Automatically optimize WordPress images with Smush It
One way to make your sites load faster is to reduce the size of your graphic files as much as you can without losing image quality. SmushIt is a Yahoo service that does this for you. WP-SmushIt is a WordPress plugin that does this automatically for you. As you upload images to your posts, WP-SmushIt…
One way to make your sites load faster is to reduce the size of your graphic files as much as you can without losing image quality. SmushIt is a Yahoo service that does this for you. WP-SmushIt is a WordPress plugin that does this automatically for you. As you upload images to your posts, WP-SmushIt sends them to SmushIt for lossless compression – that means, they get compressed as small as possible without looking any different.
WP-SmushIt can also compress images in your theme. Under your “Appearance” sidebar, you’ll see a WP-SmushIt link. Press it, and it shows you a list of your themes. Click the one you’re using. You get a list of all the graphic files in that theme. Select them all, or individually if you prefer. At the bottom, click the “submit query” button. SmushIt compresses the files and tells you how much it saved on each one. That’s it. You don’t have to update anything.
Now, once in a while Yahoo’s service skips a beat and your images do not get compressed. This is fixable. Every now and then, go into your Media Library from the sidebar (click “media”, then underneath it, “library”). It will show all your uploaded photos from your articles, the post they’re connected with, and in the final column, the current state of Smushiness. For example:
- “Reduced by X%” means you’ve already Smushed it. There’s a “re-smush it” link now, but every time I’ve clicked that, it gives me the message “No savings.” Which is cool, because that means you’re getting maximum smushage the first time around.
- “Not Processed” means you’ve never tried to Smush-It. Go ahead and do it.
- Sometimes you get “Smush.it error: Failed to create a temp dir.” This is the one that tells you Yahoo’s service borked – like I was talking about above. Just “re-smush” until the SmushIt servers get less overloaded, and you’ll get the “Reduced by X%” message.
This is also a way to Smush all the images you’ve already uploaded. Unfortunately there’s no way to do it in bulk, but you only have to do it once. Checking the media library for error messages like “Failed to create a temp dir” allows you to Smush any images that were uploaded while the SmushIt server was on the fritz.
This plugin has made a significant different for load times on several of my websites.
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